and travel tell us of no race so rude as to lack artificial means of offence and defence. To these, indeed, man's ingenuity and artistic efforts must, in his simple youthtide, have been confined. I do not allude to the complete man, created fullgrown in body and mind by the priestly castes of Egypt, Phoenicia, Judæa, Assyria, Persia, and India. The Homo sapiens whom we have to consider is the 'Adam Kadmon,' not of the Cabbalist, but of the anthropologist, as soon as he raised himself above the beasts of the field by superiority of brains and hands. 2 The lower animals are born armed, but not weaponed. The arm, indeed, is rather bestial than human : the weapon is, speaking generally, human, not bestial. Naturalists have doubted, and still doubt, whether in the so-called natural state the lower animals use weapons properly so termed. Colonel A. Lane Fox, a diligent student of primitive warfare, and a distinguished anthropologist, distinctly holds the hand-stone to be the prehistoric weapon. He quotes (Cat. pp. 156–59) the ape using the hand-stone to crack nutshells; the gorillas defending themselves against the Carthaginians of Hanno; and Pedro de Cieza (Cieça) de Leon1 telling us that when the Spaniards [in Peru] pass under the trees where the monkeys are, these creatures break off branches and throw them down, making faces all the time.' Even in the days of Strabo (xv. 1) it was asserted that Indian monkeys climb precipices, and roll down stones upon their pursuers—a favourite tactic with savages. Nor, indeed, is it hard to believe that the Simiads, whose quasi-human hand has prehensile powers, bombard their assailants with cocoa-nuts and other missiles. Major Denham (1821-24), a trustworthy traveller, when exploring about Lake Chad, says of the quadrumans of the Yeou country : 'The monkeys, or, as the Arabs say, men enchanted (Beny Adam meshood), were so numerous that I saw upwards of a hundred and fifty assembled at one place in the evening. They did not appear at all inclined to give up their ground, but, perched on the top of a bank some twenty feet high, made a terrible noise, and, rather gently than otherwise, pelted us as we approached within a certain distance.' Herr Holub, also, was designedly aimed at by a herd of African There are still races which are unable to kindle fire. This is asserted of the modern Andamanese by an expert, Mr. H. Man, Journ. Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1882, p. 272. The same was the case with the quondam aborigines of Tasmania. 2 This Adam Primus was of both sexes, the biune parent of Genesis (v. 3)-'male and female created He them;' hence the pre-Adamites of Moslem belief. The capital error of Biblical readers in our day is to assume all these myths and mysteries as mere historical details. Men had a better appreciation of the Hebrew arcana in the days of Philo Judæus. I have noted his labours in the list of 'Authorities.' Chap. iii. p. 43, translated for the Hakluyt Society by Clements R. Markham, C. B. (London, 1869). It is regretable that a senile Committee of exceeding 'properness' cut out so much of this highly-interesting volume. The Spaniard travelled in A. D. 1532-50, published the first part of his work in 1553, and died about 1560. Readers who would study the most valuable anthropological parts of the book are driven to the French translation quoted by Vicente Fidel Lopez (Les Races Aryennes du Pérou, p. 199. Paris, Franck, 1873). 5 We need not go to the classics, Greek and Roman, for the idea of metamorphosis. It is common to mankind, doubtless arising from the resemblance of beast to man in appearance, habits, or disposition; and it may date from the days when the lower was all but equal to the higher animal. • Seven Years in South Africa, 1872-79, vol. i. p. 245, and vol. ii. p. 199 (Sampson Low and Co., 1881). The Simiads were African baboons, which fear man less than those of other continents. baboons perched among the trees;' and on another occasion he and his men had to beat an ignominious retreat from our cousins.' 'Hence,' suggests Colonel A. Lane Fox, 'our "poor relation" conserves, even when bred abroad and in captivity, the habit of violently shaking the branch by jumping upon it with all its weight, in order that the detached fruit may fall upon the assailant's head.' In Egypt, as we see from the tomb-pictures, monkeys (baboons or cynocephali) were taught to assist in gathering fruit, and in acting as torch-bearers. While doing this last duty, their innate petulance caused many a merry scene.1 I never witnessed this bombardment by monkeys. But when my regiment was stationed at Baroda in Gujarát, several of my brother officers and myself saw an elephant use a weapon. The intelligent animal, which the natives call Háthi ('the handed '2), was chained to a post during the dangerous season of the wet forehead, and was swaying itself in ill-temper from side to side. Probably offended by the sudden appearance of white faces, it seized with its trunk a heavy billet, and threw it at our heads with a force and a good will that proved the worst intention. According to Captain Hall-who, however, derived the tale from the Eskimos,3 the sole living representatives of the palæolithic age in Europe-the polar dear, traditionally reported to throw stones, rolls down, with its quasi-human forepaws, rocks and boulders upon the walrus when found sleeping at the foot of some overhanging cliff. 'Meister Petz' aims at the head, and finally brains the stunned prey with the same weapon. Perhaps the account belongs to the category of the ostrich throwing stones, told by many naturalists, including Pliny (x. 1), when, as Father Lobo explained in his Abyssinia,' the bird only kicks them up during its scouring flight. Similar, too, is the exploded shooting-out of the porcupine's quills, whereby, according to mediæval 'Shoe-tyes'4 men have been badly hurt 1 Wilkinson, I. 1. Unruliness was punished by 'stick and no supper.' The old Nile-dwellers, like the Carthaginians and the medieval Tartars, were famous for taming and training the wildest animals, the cat o' mountain, leopards, crocodiles, and gazelles. The 'war-lions of the king' (Ramses II.) are famed in history. They also taught domestic cats to retrieve waterfowl, and decoy-ducks to cater or the table. 2 Thus Lucretius (v. 1301) calls the elephant 'anguimānus.' As is well known, there is a quasispecific difference between the Indian and the African animal. The latter is shorter, stouter, and more compactly built than the former; the shape of the frontal bones differ, the tusks are larger and heavier, and the ears are notably longer. The latter trait appears even in old coins. Judging from the illustrated papers, I should not hesitate to pronounce the far-famed Jumbo to be an Asiatic, and not, as usually held, an African. 3 The word wrongly written Esquimaux,' which suggests a French origin, is derived from the Ojibwa Askimeg, or the Abenakin Eskimantsic, meaning eaters of raw flesh.' Old usage applies it to the races of extreme North America, and of the Asiatic shore immediately opposite. Innuit, a more modern term, signifies only the people,' like Khoi-khoi ('men of men'), the Hottentots, and like 'Bantu' (Folk), applied, or rather misapplied, to the great South African race. Innuit, moreover, is by no means universal. The Eskimos supply a valuable study; amongst other primeval peculiarities, they have little reverence for the dead, and scant attachment to place. Brave Master Shoe-tye, the great traveller' (Measure for Measure, iv. 3). The tale of porcupines shooting their quills at the dogs, which get many a serious wound thereby,' is in M. Polo (i. 28). Colonel Yule quotes Pliny, Ælian, and the Chinese. The animal drops its loose quills when running, and when at bay attempts, hedgehog-like, to hide and shield its head. It is, as the Gypsies know, excellent eating, equal to the most delicate pork; only semewhat dry without the aid of lard. 1 and even killed. On the other hand, the Emu kicks like an Onager and will drive a man from one side of a quarter-deck to the other. But though Man's first work was to weapon himself, we must not believe with the Cynics and the Humanitarians that his late appearance in creation, or rather on the stage of life, initiated an unvarying and monotonous course of destructiveness. The great tertiary mammals which preceded him, the hoplotherium, the deinotherium, and other -theria, made earth a vast scene of bloodshed to which his feeble powers could add only a few poor horrors. And even in our day the predatory fishes, that have learned absolutely nothing from man's inhumanity to man, habitually display as much ferocity as ever disgraced savage human nature. Primitive man-the post-tertiary animal-was doomed by the very conditions of his being and his media to a life of warfare; a course of offence to obtain his food, and of defence to retain his life. Ulysses says pathetically: No thing frailer of force than Man earth breedeth and feedeth; The same sentiment occurs in the 'Iliad'; and Pliny, the pessimist, writes—' the only tearful animal, Man.' The career of these wretches, who had neither minds' nor 'souls,' was one long campaign against ravenous beasts and their brother' man-brutes. was never anything to them but a fitful interval of repose. The golden age of the poets was a dream; as Videlou remarked, 'Peace means death for all barbarian races.' The existence of our earliest ancestors was literally the Battle of Life. Then, as now, the Great Gaster was the first Master of Arts, and War was the natural condition of humanity upon which depends the greater part of its progress, its rising from the lower to the higher grade. Hobbism, after all, is partly right: 'Men were by nature equal, and their only social relation was a state of war.' Like the children of our modern day, helpless and speechless, primæval Homo possessed, in common with his fellow-creatures, only the instincts necessary for self-support under conditions the most facile. Uncultivated thought is not rich in the productive faculty; the brain does not create ideas: it only combines them and evolves the novelty of deduction, and the development of what is found existing. Similarly in language, onomatopoeia, the imitation of natural sounds, the speech of Man's babyhood, still endures; and to it we owe our more picturesque and life-life expressions. But, despite their feeble powers, compulsory instruction, the Instructor being Need, was continually urging the Savage and the Barbarian to evolve safety out of danger, comfort out of its contrary. For man, compelled by necessity of his nature to weapon himself, bears within 1 Ammianus Marcellinus (xxiii. chap. 4), quoted in chap. 2. 2 Odyss. xviii. 130, 131. 'Qui multum peregrinatur, rarò sanctificatur,' said the theologians. Hence the modern : Whoso wanders like Ulysses Soon shall lose his prejudices. him the two great principles of Imitation and Progress. Both are, after a fashion, his peculiar attributes, being rudimentary amongst the lower animals, though by no means wholly wanting. His capacity of language, together with secular development of letters and literature, enabled him to accumulate for himself, and to transmit to others, a store of experience acquired through the medium of the senses; and this, once gained, was never wholly lost. By degrees immeasurably slower than among civilised societies, the Savage digested and applied to the Present and to the Future the hoarded wisdom of the Past. The imitative faculty, a preponderating advantage of the featherless biped over the quadruped, taught the former, even in his infancy, to borrow ad libitum, while he lent little or nothing. As a quasi-solitary Hunter' he was doomed to fray and foray, to destroying others in order to preserve himself and his family: a condition so constant and universal as to include all others. Become a Shepherd, he fought man and beast to preserve and increase his flocks and herds; and rising to an Agriculturist, he was ever urged to break the peace by greed of gain, by ambition, and by the instinctive longing for excitement.2 But there was no absolute point of separation, as far as the material universe is concerned, to mark the dawn of a new 'creative period '; and the Homo Darwiniensis made by the Aristotle of our age, the greatest of English naturalists, is directly connected with the Homo sapiens. There are hosts of imitative animals, birds as well as beasts; but the copying-power is essentially limited. Moreover, it is 'instinctive,' the work of the undeveloped, as opposed to reasoning,' the process of the highly-developed brain and nervous system. Whilst man has taught himself to articulate, to converse, the dog, which only howled and whined, has learned nothing except to bark. Man, again, is capable of a development whose bounds we are unable to determine; whereas the beast, incapable of selfculture, progresses, under the most favourable circumstances, automatically and within comparatively narrow bounds. Upon the imitative faculty and its exercise I must dwell at greater length. It is regretable that the delicious wisdom of Pope neglected to point out the great lesson of the animal-world in suggesting and supplying the arts of offence and defence: Learn from the little nautilus to sail, Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.1 Man, especially in the tropical and sub-tropical zones-his early, if not his earliest, home, long ago whelmed beneath the ocean waves-would derive many a useful hint from the dreadful armoury of equinoctial vegetation; the poison-trees the large strong spines of the Acacia and the Mimosa, e.g. the Wait-a-bit (Acacia detinens), the Gleditschia, the Socotrine Aloe, the American Agave, and the piercing thorns of the Caryota urens, and certain palms. The aboriginal races would be further instructed in offensive and defensive arts by the powerful and destructive fera of the sunny river-plains, where the Savage was first induced to build permanent abodes. Before noting the means of attack and protection which Nature suggested, we may distribute Hoplology, the science of arms and weapons of offence and defence, human and bestial, into two great orders, of which the latter can be subdivided into four species: 1. Missile. 2. Armes d'hast.-a. Percussive or striking; b. Thrusting, piercing, or ramming; c. Cutting or ripping; d. Notched or serrated. Colonel A. Lane Fox (Prim. Warfare,' p. 11) thus classifies the weapons of 'Animals and Savages':- My list is less comprehensive, and it bears only upon the origin of the Arme blanche. I. As has been said, the missile, the Béλos, is probably the first form of weapon, and is still the favourite with savage Man. It favours the natural self-preservative instinct. El-Khauf maksúm-' fear is distributed,'-say the Arabs. 'The shorter the weapon the braver the wielder' has become a well-established fact. The savage Hunter, whose time is his own, would prefer the missile; but the Agriculturist, compelled to be at home for seed-time and harvest, would choose the hand-to-hand Essay on Man, iii. 172–6. |